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"We already know that kids who grow up surrounded by reading material are more likely to develop a taste for books as entertainment than ones that aren't. All that needs to be decided, then, are what books to surround them with."

\"I am a librarian in a medium-sized public library, and I\'m losing my patience about one particular issue...\"

\"...Public libraries are a popular choice for child molesters and \"peepers\" to frequent and search for victims. Parents, please do not leave your little ones alone at the library. We librarians have jobs to do, and although we care deeply about the safety of your children, we are not baby sitters.\" (from Yahoo News)

"Eliminating Sunday hours at most Queens Borough Public Library locations 18 months ago was bad enough. Now, city budget cuts have forced library officials to close 50 of their 63 libraries on Saturdays, too. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has vowed to protect the city's quality of life during fiscal crises, but if reducing opportunities for children to read doesn't qualify as an encroachment, nothing does."

"And the cuts affect more than library patrons. Fewer operating hours require fewer librarians and clerks, which will result in dozens of layoffs in coming weeks." (from Newsday)

SomeOne pointed to Newsday.com and an article that says Fourth-graders in the United States score better in reading than many of their peers around the world, but poor and minority U.S. students still lag behind other U.S. learners, a new international study shows. The United States had the second-lowest student-to-teacher ratio in primary education, but in secondary education, U.S. schools had the second highest ratio of students to teachers.

It's an awful story. According to CNN, "A 10-year-old boy was charged with murder Thursday for allegedly luring a 3-year-old boy out of a library, beating him with a baseball bat, sexually assaulting him and dumping him in a ditch."

"Win the Caldecott medal, which the American Library Association has been awarding annually since 1938 for ''the most distinguished picture book for children,'' and you join the august company of artists such as Robert McCloskey, Ludwig Bemelmans, Barbara Cooney, Maurice Sendak, and Margot Zemach."

"This year's winner is Eric Rohmann, for ''My Friend Rabbit,'' a merry tale of a well-meaning, bad-luck rabbit who brings chaos as he tries to retrieve his little mouse friend's airplane, which he'd sent loop-the-looping into a treetop. The text is suitably spare, and in the manner of Sendak's great ''Where the Wild Things Are'' (but without the nuance), words disappear entirely in the wild-action middle pages. The idiosyncratic ''Not to worry'' is repeated thrice, thus accounting for 11 percent of the pages' 80 words. The book will not win a literary award."

"The illustrations, either wood or lino prints, are fun, funny, and generous in spirit. It's a rollicking nice book. That's about it." (from The Boston Globe)

News From Florida where a measure in the Senate would allow parents to learn the titles of overdue books checked out of libraries by their kids.

Confidentiality laws currently prevent libraries from disclosing to parents what materials their children had borrowed, even though the parent may be responsible for the fines if the books are overdue.

The bill (SB 192) would allow parents of children younger than 16 to learn the titles of overdue materials checked out by their children. The Florida Library Association supports the change, which could reach the full Senate as early as today.

Luiza Dini writes: "This is an NPR story of the International Children's Digital Library, a full-text website of children's literature, both older (Alice in Wonderland) and newer titles (Axle the Freeway Cat) from around the world."

"When Daniel Webster was told one of hischildren had an overdue library book, the state lawmaker tried to find out the title, just like most parents would, so he couldtrack it down and return it."

"He needed the name becausethe book was mixed in with scores of other titles at the Webster household, where everyone has their own library card and likes to read."

"But even the influential Republican lawmaker couldn't pry the information out of Orange County librarians."

"They would say, 'We can't tell what the name of it is,' " Webster, a state senator and former speaker of the Florida House, recalled of the exchange he hadabout five years ago, when all six of hischildren were still at home. "It was a nightmare." (from The Orlando Sentinel)

Charlotte.com has This One on Jim Trelease, the nationally known literacy advocate.
He says the most important thing you can do for a child, aside from a hug, is "Read aloud to him, from crib through adolescence." Despite overwhelming evidence that reading aloud to youngsters is enormously beneficial, Trelease says, only 39 percent of parents with children younger than 3 read to them daily. Why?

"There's not enough pain involved," the author said in a recent interview from his home in Springfield, Mass. "Many parents subscribe to the Vince Lombardi approach to learning -- no pain, no gain; the medicine can't do any good unless it hurts going down. It's so much fun, reading to your children, that you don't think it's doing any good."